New to SDxCentral? Want to learn more about SDN and NFV? Interested in hearing from top vendors and organizations about new products and services? All of these are great reasons to visit our events pageto register for more SDxCentral SDN and NFV events, including webinars, DemoFridays, and more. If you want to see what we’ve done in the past, check out our archives forDemoFridayandSDNUniversity.

If there is a technology area that is heating up as quickly as SDN, it has to be photonics. The promise of affordable optics in the datacenter is changing how we think about network architectures, making possible a new class of low-latency, high-bandwidth transport. On June 14, we will demonstrate how we can use real-time flow information to drive network optimization in hybrid packet-optical datacenters, a concept envisioned by leading university and industry researchers during the last decade, and now commercially available through a collaboration between Plexxi and CALIENT.

Plexxi brings SDN principles to a shipping datacenter product. The demonstration will showcase Plexxi’s optically-connected switches built around a controller-based architecture. At the core of Plexxi’s networking view is the notion that the job doesn’t end at connectivity and that traditional leaf-spine architectures miss the point. The IT infrastructure world revolves around applications and end-user experience. Without understanding who is talking to who (this app on this VM to that disk on that server), the network fundamentally misses out on the biggest value it can add: improving these conversations.

CALIENT sees the world through the lens of photonic switching. The highest-bandwidth loads with the lowest-latency requirements need something fundamentally different from traditional switching architectures. So CALIENT married cutting-edge photonics with 3D MEMS circuit switching fabrics to deliver a product that sits at the sweet spot of massively scalable bandwidth, small form factor, low power consumption, and ease of use.

The combination of these two – a programmable network and 3D optical MEMS technology – makes possible a hybrid packet-optical datacenter that can scale out existing packet networks with an Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) network. We will demonstrate how real-time data harvested from Calient’s application performance monitoring solution can be used to dynamically offload large flows onto the optical fabric. This demonstration is about optimizing infrastructure from multiple vendors based on external inputs, including events and monitoring information. This optical-SDN demo will be smoke and mirrors – without the smoke.

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